1. Field
The present invention relates to a failure response support apparatus and failure response support method for responding to failure of a management subject apparatus, based on incident information.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, failures occurring in a computer system, including hardware, software and a network communication function, are increasing. This is because configurations of the hardware and software of computer systems are becoming more complex.
In the event of such a failure, error information output by the computer system is reported to a system support personnel side. The system support personnel side which accepts the report generates incident information (opens an incident) with the received error information as a base. The incident information includes all information relating to the failure, from the failure occurring to a failure response.
The system support personnel side instructs maintenance operation personnel dispatched to a computer system side to collect information (various kinds of log, system setting information, processing conditions and the like, which information will hereafter be called “material”) necessary to identify a cause of the failure, and send it to the system support personnel side.
Then, the system support personnel side manually analyzes the received material, and carries out an identification of the cause and a determination of a response method. In the event that the received material is insufficient for identification of the cause and determination of the response, the system support personnel side instructs the maintenance operation personnel to further collect other material, and send it to the system support personnel side.
That is, the further collection and sending of material by the maintenance operation personnel, and the analysis of the received material by the system support personnel side, are repeated until the cause of the failure can be identified and the response method decided on. When the cause of the failure is finally identified and the response method decided on, the cause and response method are added to the incident information, and the incident information is closed. Then, the response method is presented to the maintenance operation personnel, and the maintenance operation personnel, based on the presentation, carry out a specific failure response.
As heretofore described, as a procedure of the failure response is cumbersome, an authoring tool has been proposed for a Bayesian Network troubleshooter which, in the event of a failure occurring in a computer system, supports a failure cause identification by transposing answers to questions given to a user of the computer system into a predetermined data structure, as disclosed in, for example, JP-A-2001-117776.
Also, as disclosed in, for example, JP-A-2005-316998, in the event of a failure occurring in a computer system, failure information is converted into a structured response object. The structured response object includes a term and/or phrase linked to a description of a problem relating to the computer system. Based on the term and/or phrase linked to the description of the problem, diagnosis data corresponding to the failure information converted into the structured response object is provided to the user. The user carries out a failure response in accordance with the diagnosis data.